I have this friend Liz. We’ve met on the internet when she posted on a livejournal forum asking how to get her email to load on her phone. I answered her question and somehow from this we added each other on lj and started messaging back and forth. Now we pretty much are as “inseparable” as two people who live 6 and 1/2 hours apart can be. We spend all day texting back and forth and sending each other photos of all the hilarious things we encounter in our daily lives. It’s a really crazy thing to find a friend like that and keep in touch with them.

Well, we’ve actually only seen each other in person three times. Every time we’ve commemorated with a cake!
The first time we ever hung out was at the Hell City Tattoo Convention in Columbus, Ohio. I made an Ohio shaped cake for the event.

The second time was the Phunk -n- Ink Tattoo convention in Fort Wayne, IN… so that time, I made an Indiana shaped cake!

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I packed up the Jetta and headed out to Wisconsin to see her in her home state! We headed out to Milwaukee with a cake to fit the theme!

Don’t worry, as soon as we arrived, she informed me of my ill-placed apostrophe! Yikes. that’s what’s happens when you decorate cakes in the middle of the night…
I did the only thing I could do… plucked it from the cake and ate it.

Now, I’ve talked on here before about near disasters with cakes… the Auburndale cake that slammed into the back seat of the car most recently.
This cake… some how did worse than that. I honestly have NO idea how it survived…

We were bringing all of our things upstairs to Liz’s apartment and had it all piled on a cart. My husband was trying to push it with one hand while talking on the phone with the other hand… evidently, the cake was perched quite precariously atop this pile… and it fell.
Not like, gingerly slid to the floor. Like… it FELL. Upside down, hit the ground with a thud fell.

Of course, I thought a blood vessel was going to burst in my brain when it hit the ground. I raced to the box and carefully but quickly flipped it right side up and opened it.

I couldn’t believe it. Not only had this car survived the 6 1/2 hour car trip, but also a totally insane drop! I don’t even think the cake separated from the board.
Here’s the cake post fall and post apostrophe’ nomming.

See! Almost completely unscathed!

While I have your captive audience, let’s talk about how awesome Milwaukee is. I had no idea and maybe you don’t know either.

I think that when we crossed the state line, we expected it to all be farms full of cows and giant wheels of cheese instead of bales of hay along the pastures. We didn’t really see many cows… and well, obviously there were no wheels of cheese in the fields, but when we got into Milwaukee, we realized how much we underestimated it!

As it turns out, Milwaukee is totally a major city. The architecture is stunning and the downtown is amazing.

The water was just glorious. I love the great lakes because standing by them makes you feel so… small. Like the water goes forever. When you live in the Midwest, this is as close to the ocean as you can get.

If it wouldn’t have been so cold I had snotsicles on my septum ring, it would have been pretty down right soothing. Seriously, it was freaking freezing though, but the photos come out lovely.

I’ve also never seen anything like the wind farm we drove through in Indiana. It was absolutely breathtaking. I could hardly drive because I was in such awe! I had to slow down and stare.

So yeah, that was my trip to Wisconsin. While I was there, I ate lots of cheese, drank Four Loko, stole a case of beer from Hawthorne Height’s dressing room, spent $50 on a bag of groceries at Whole Foods, snuggled a Maine Coon, got locked into a drum store, went to a craft show, had the best stromboli of my life and more things than I could ever list or remember. That’s what most people do on vacation, right?
It was perfect.